Do you find yourself spending too much time sifting through articles on UX, Product Design, and HCI just to realize you didn’t learn anything new? I’ve been pretty annoyed at home much time I’ve sunk into reading the same article on why it’s important to create journey maps or how to write personas. So annoyed, in fact, that I’ve taking to trying my hardest ingest real research papers in the field.
Why take that time if it isn’t worth sharing with the rest of you. So in an effort to make us smarter, send us down rabbit holes of interesting ideas, and maybe stop paying for that medium subscription, I’ve started a venture to share some of what I’ve found on Substack and hopefully find a paid subscriber or two.
So if you feel the same way I have about the current state of the shared knowledge that is being created online, check out the first (very free) issue of academiUX.
I’m trying my best today to set aside some time to ‘#SignalZero’ - clean up all the bookmarks, research papers, and feeds that I’ve managed to collect over the last couple weeks.
At some point during my life, I decided to never buy anything other than black socks so that I wouldn’t have to spend time matching them. What actually happened, is that I spend more time now looking at subtleties between them… This one is ultra low, this one is rust regular low. This one has stitches at the toe, this one has stitches above the toe. This logo is the old brand, this one is the new one. It’s much too complicated, I think from here on out, I’m just going to wear sandles.
It has been a few years since I’ve made a holiday card. In 2020, right in the middle of covid, I posted a woodcarving of ancient Greeks celebrating Saturnalia Festivas, all while wearing masks. The one person bowing to the Festivas pole still cracks me up when I look at it. Check out my 2020 Holiday Card.
So what the hell is wrong with me this year, you might be asking? I think it’s pretty straight forward. I’ve seen way too many politicians posting cards with their families holding guns. That’s weird right? It’s not just me?
There’s nothing more wholesome than the Muppets and they have brought me and my kids a lot of joy over the decades. But look how quickly the tone of the image changes with the addition of some assault rifles. This was supposed to be kind of funny, but it’s not. I’m sorry on behalf of the rest of humanity.
For anyone of any religion or those of no religion, I hope that during this time of year we, while a lot of the world is celebrating, can stop with the hatred, killing, suffering, and sadness and be better humans to each other. I’m looking forward to a different 2024.
For the last couple weeks I’ve been really focused on things that don’t create output that’s worth sharing online. I haven’t posted a photo in a while and I sure haven’t been writing as much as I should be.
This year, both my kids (15 & 16), who have been doing home-school for nearly 7 years have gone back into the public school system. It was a big transition for both of them, my daughter thrived, but my son revolted. After weeks of trying to inspire him, motivate him and reprimand him, he said he was the most unhappy he’s ever been - and that was tough. He’s a lot like me - not a big fan of people, not a big fan of bathroom policies and I was able to pull some strings and get him into a remote version of the same school. So although he’s back to doing school from home, he has access to the public school’s resources for guidance counseling, extra-curricular activities, and even tutoring and study groups. The biggest issue with the transition to remote learning was that he needed to make up the previous 8 weeks of work, nearly doubling his workload.
So every night, after nearly 8 hours of work for me and 6 hours of schooling for him, we’ve sat down for several hours - practicing math, studying history, and putting time into catching up. He’s never once complained, he’s thriving again, and is giving it all his energy to never have to go back to in-person school. How can I argue with that, I made the same proclamation about work - Why should anyone force him to go back when he knows what works for him…
I’m not sure how it feels like the time has gone by really fast yet has taken so long, my youngest is turning 15. His level of maturity and inappropriate humor is on par with me now and it’s a comedic blast.
For years I was an unofficial spokesperson for #Figma. I tried my best to convince everyone that it was the future of design and, for a while, people resisted. There wasn’t a tool out there that could do what Figma did. For anyone that’s been watching, it has somehow become the de-facto tool for interface design, for good reason. One of the reasons I loved it so much was that it wasn’t #Adobe, but I’m not going to get into that here.
Almost every piece of software I use in my work (outside of my day job) is open source, with Figma being the one exception. I’ve played around with a lot of different options for open source #UX, but there just wasn’t anything that could compare.
And then came PenPot. I’ve been watching from afar as it has developed, played around to get a feel for the features, but never delved deep into using it in my regular workflow. Today, however, as I start a new freelance project, PenPot is where I’m starting and I plan on doing all my freelance/personal work from here on out with it.
Figma, I appreciate you but I have to move on. Team #PenPot!
I’ve been a bit quiet on the intertubes the last couple of weeks, work and life have been pretty exhausting. For the long weekend, I might get out and take some photos or work on some art, but likely I’m just going to stare at the wall until I’ve recovered. I hope the extra time will be enough…
There seem to be more bills being proposed in the US than usual that are trying to limit encryption, allow greater surveillance over citizens, and generally make the internet more shitty. Could you all do me a favor and write a letter or 10 to your congressmen and senators - no matter your stance? They need our help in understanding. The EFF makes it real easy so please take 5 minutes out of your day: https://act.eff.org/action
I was on pixelfed for a bit but I’ve since transitioned off there. I went through and followed a number of my active followers. I’ll try and be more active myself…
In another act of defiance against the internet’s corporate overlords (I’ve been on a roll the last few weeks), I’ve decided to ‘rescind my invitation to google’ to crawl and index content on my website. ✊ #ai#indieweb
I’m finally abandoning Twitter and Instagram. Every post, tweet, reply and photo from the last 16+ years has been moved to my own website in hopes to promote a web outside of walled gardens and their goal of making profit off us all. #fediverse#indieweb
It took the better half of a day, but I was finally able to take all of my Instagram posts (nearly 2000 of them) and migrate them to my website. It took a bit of wrangling python to parse the Instagram JSON export and build out all the pages in Hugo, but it was a nice change of pace from what I normally do. Maybe I’ll share that code later. The page is a bit janky thanks to the size of the photos, so I’ll still need to go through and make smaller thumbnail versions. That’s a task for another day. Check ’em out: https://uxbrad.com/tags/photos/
Okay, I just went in and download all my data from Twitter so I can delete that account. It had been on my list for some time but I get kind of lazy distracted by other things. I’m trying to figure out how to get along with the IndieWeb (another task that’s been on my list for years). As of today, it says I was on twitter for 16 years, 2 months and 13 days. Those early years were fun, but these current ones - not so much. Now to figure out what to do with all this data…
Renewed my CPACC cert. It’s great to see the list of people that have joined me. For anyone that’s new - don’t put off the CE credits until the last year before it runs out. 🤦 Regrettably, I waited until the last possible moment, but pulled it off. Learned my lesson. #a11y
“Accessibility is a necessity for some, but useful for all” - @TheRancorMedic - Enjoyed the talk on #a11y at #BCPhilly. I added a couple things to my Christmas list thanks to those infomercials.
Forgot to mention that I officially got a Master’s Degree this week. The commencement ceremony consisted of a 2-minute video that was emailed to me. Between that and all the student discounts I got on Hulu, Spotify and software, it was very much with the 50 grand.
My favorite photo that I took this week is of my attempt at drawing my own qr code with a secret message in it. There’s too many damn squares in those things so I gave up.
In the 13 years that I’ve been using twitter, the quality of the people and tweets has never stopped surprising me in terrible terrible ways. #MyTwitterAnniversary
Help with my UX Masters Thesis!? Participate in an interview about UX Research/Design and be reasonably compensated.
I’m spending the next several weeks recruiting UX Designers/Researchers to participate in interviews. - Work in the field? Have an hour to spare? Message me!
Walked up to a row of urinals at the exact time as two other dudes. I said “ready, go!” but it didn’t become awkward until I quietly cheered for the guy that finished first.
